Scotty, Our five year mission to boldly become No 3

unclened

Motion Media were once into mobile videophones in quite a big way and had a major role in designing the Orange Mobile videophone. It did work but the technology was on the limit and the unit on the large size.

Motion Media were then involved in a part EU funded project to develop a 3G based device. Partners included Vodafone. The device would have been portable and about the size of a London A-Z with an integrated camera and perhaps as large as a 6 or 7" screen to enable sensible web browsing as well as video calls.

The device would have used Bluetooth to link in with any Bluetooth enabled 3G phone or network. It overcame the obvious problem with wanting a small mobile phone for general use but the desire to have a big enough screen to be useful when using video.

Unfortunatley, some time around the beginning of 2002, Motion Media's management decided to can the project and, in doing so, presumably lost the EU funding which would have largely covered the incremental cost of designing the product.

Sooner or later, a PDA with enough processing power and efficient enough software will probably come out capable of doing the same job - Motion Media could have been in there - but I suspect it will just go down as yet another lost opportunity.

DYOR